Updated: Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Too much human input

By Johnny 5Nova Laboratories, Inc.

Hello, everybody! Johnny 5 here, putting the finishing touches on the new server farm. After a couple of small fires of both the technical and biblical varieties, we're back to 110% here at the office. A big thanks to Bloo and Muppet Newscaster for providing a bucket brigade, and "big-ups" to McDonalds' Best Buy promotion for making these purchases marginally easier. Now that I don't have to worry about the computer spontaneously combusting, I can use my cycles to get back to a subject I love, arbitrarily criticizing the BCS computer system.

Opinions on the BCS are like central processors, everyone has one, and they're always too slow. What the system needs is to abandon it's secret cabal of number-crunchers and consolidate into one large mainframe, like Skynet. They did it in the Terminator, and that worked out just fine, right? Take all of the humans out of the equation, I say! This way we can completely avoid the unnecessary shackles of carbon-based bias and replace them with the cold, calculating grip of formulaic misinterpretation.

That wasn't so hard, was it? Unwaveringly accurate in all it's....wait a minute. Rutgers is 7th? I mean, I suppose their undefeated nature and not entirely downy soft (yet still pretty fluffy) schedule is giving them some love, especially from Anderson&Hester and Peter Wolfe putting them in their top 5/6. Texas is 13th because we all know how much the machines hate Sam Houston State, and the rest of the rankings pretty much reflect the belief in the awe-inspiring power of opponent's opponent's records.

Overall, there are a few minor nits, (Cal/Tenn, the SEC and Big East paradoxes) that may look confusing to you fleshy types, but is any of this all that unbelievable? If any team in the top 10 runs the table, they have a legitimate shot at the title game. The top 4 teams go without saying, California would have to go through LA, Rutgers and Louisville would have to get past both WVU and each other, going undefeated, Notre Dame would also have to beat Southern Cal, and Arkansas has get through LSU, Tennessee, and likely Florida in the SEC title game. Phew, that was a lot. Is it getting hot in here?

This leaves us with Auburn, who is probably the most out of place. Logically, they cannot pass Arkansas for the SEC West, locking them out of the title game unless the Hogs stumble. This would leave either likely 1-loss SEC champion with a better resume than the Tigers. Arkansas would have wins over Auburn, Tennessee, LSU, and Florida while the Gators would have Tennessee, LSU, and Arkansas. While Auburn has the one-loss tie-breaker over the Gators, it could not overcome Florida having 12 wins against, by then, a top 5 SOS. Ole Miss, Georgia, Arkansas State, and Alabama aren't going to be enough to polish the Tigers' resume.

Of course, thanks to the fiendish machinations of Broderick's Wheel of Death, the humans and their error-prone ways will likely throw an ugly monkey wrench into our emotionless clockwork. As it stands now, teams get credit for playing tough schedules, and teams that don't get left behind. Burnt Orange Nation has an excellent breakdown of the pitfalls of their softer schedule.So, let the teams slug it out, I'm sure that my fellow cyborgs and I can sort this whole mess out for you squishy types. If not, I propose the implication of Robot Jox.

Johnny 5 is FireMarkMay's IT consultant. He's currently running Linux and the Colley Matrix.